Your Intelligence Isn’t Magical.

I’m writing a series of posts summarizing my views on the Intelligence Explosion, and the first claim I want to defend is that we should take seriously the possibility of human-level artificial intelligence because fundamentally human intelligence is not magic.

Human intelligence is the product of the brain, an object of staggering complexity which, nevertheless, is built up from thoroughly non-magical components. When neurons are networked together into more and more sophisticated circuitry, there is no point at which magic enters the process and gives rise to intelligence.

Furthermore, human intelligence is the product of the blind, brute-force search algorithm which is evolution. Organisms are born with random mutations into environments which act as fitness functions. Beneficial mutations preserve themselves by leading to greater reproductive success while deleterious ones eliminate themselves by lowering reproductive success. Evolution slowly explores possibilities by acting on and changing existing DNA patterns.

Even without engineering oversight, evolution managed to produce Homo Sapiens, primates with the ability to reason across a wide variety of domains and use their intelligence in ways radically different from the uses for which it evolved.

This is not to imply that our intelligence is well understood; my impression is that great strides have been made in modeling brain activity, but we are surely still a long way from having probed these mysteries fully.

Nor does it imply that building a human-level intelligence will be easy. For decades now AI researchers and computer scientists have been trying, making progress in various narrowly defined tasks like chess, but still nowhere near achieving the creation of a general reasoner on par with humans.

Additionally, it doesn’t imply that a human-level AI must actually resemble human intelligence in any way. AI research is a vast field, and within it there are approaches which draw on neuroscience and mathematical psychology, and de novo approaches which want to build an AI ‘from the ground up’, as it were.

But don’t lose sight of this key fact: the intelligence which produced these words is a non-magical product of a brain made of non-magical components which was produced by a non-magical process. It is hard for me to see where or why a skeptic could draw a special line in the sand at the level of a human and say ‘machines won’t ever get this far’.